Home networks have become part of everyday life for many customers. A home network consists of a range of heterogeneous devices, which means that the home network is made up of different kinds of devices. All these devices need to communicate with each other. For this interconnection multiple solutions are available: The home network uses a mixture of solutions, such as wireless and wired network connections. Combining these devices creates a network that allows users to share information and to control devices in the home. Some examples of networked devices in the home are for example residential gateways, set-top boxes, TVs, personal computers, tablet PCs, smart phones, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, printers and game consoles.
In software architecture, Publish/Subscribe is a messaging pattern where senders of messages, called publishers, do not program the messages to be sent directly to specific receivers, called subscribers. Instead, published data is multicasted, without knowledge of what, if any, subscribers there may be. Similarly, subscribers subscribe to particular data, and only receive messages that are of interest, without knowledge of what, if any, publishers there are. Entities connected within a Publish/Subscribe-based network communicate on ‘Topics’ and value changes of its parameters that are published to the ones subscribed.
DDS (Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems) is a standard governed by the Object Management Group (OMG). It describes a data-centric publish-subscribe middleware that can be used to build distributed real-time systems. Since its formal adoption as an OMG standard in the year 2004, it has become a popular technology used in many different industries such as the airline/aviation industry, the automotive industry, the military, etc. Several commercial and open-source implementations of the DDS standard exist.
Near field communication (NFC) is a set of well-established standards for smartphones and similar mobile devices to establish radio communication with each other by bringing them into contact proximity. NFC in particular allows communication between an NFC device and an unpowered NFC chip, known for example as a “tag” or an “NFC tag”. An NFC tag can be paired with an NFC enabled device, e.g. a respective smartphone, to automate a task, for example to launch an application or to execute a number of commands. The NFC standards allow a large variety of applications.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a wireless non-contact use of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for example for the purpose of automatically identifying and tracking a tag attached to an object. The tag contains electronically stored information.